Monday I almost got in a fistfight. That's right, a fistfight. That schoolyard event wherein people ball their hands and try to break each other's faces with them. Yes, I am a savage. It is true. I still have brutal manimal instincts undeneath; these things are never quite outgrown. I know this now.
The bottom of this movie's fallen right out and everyone is surly and short with each other and just wants to go home. Even the nice people are hostile and I was never one of the nice people to begin with. What we do here, what we do for a living--it's ridiculous, inane, this isn't important at all, none of it is, and my God look at all of the ego in this business where does it all come from good Lord.
So I'm already a little pissy, I've fallen in and out of a crush over a three-day period, I'm tried, my sciatica's kicking in, things are feeling hopeless, New Orleans is in the process of getting wiped off the planet. We're shooting about 35 miles southeast of Atlanta at a cabin in the woods on a pond and it's humid and miserable and the forest is filled with ticks and chiggers and spiders and mosquitoes and Lyme Disease and Hanta Virus and water moccasins that bite you and give you lockjaw and nightvision and a dark, unrelenting depression that never quite goes away. The rain has come and it is not stopping. We're on the outer fringes of Katrina and the wind is coming up and the rain keeps pounding us, harder and harder and harder. The ground is quickly turning to mud. We hide our equipment under a couple of pop-up tents, but our stuff is still getting wet and even though they finally call wrap prematurely, there is nothing we can do but sit underneath these little tents and wait for a break in the storm which just isn't happening. There are tornadoes in the area and one has ripped up 30 houses in the small town we shot at two days before. The storm is moving very slowly and the lightning is all around us, landing down every half minute or so. I try to count the seconds between thunder and lightning but it's all instaneous. We hear there are three tornadoes in the county now and the rain is coming down even harder, it doesn't seem possible, and our big lights are still on and an 18k globe explodes and the grips frantically try to take down their big stands and frames of diffusion which are all just a bunch of useless lightning rods at this point.
The trucks have been parked down a narrow dirt road, single file, about a hundred yards away and we radio transpo to back our truck right up to the set so we can get our stuff to shelter and go home. But the best boy electric has built a little staging area for his lights and stands right behind our truck, blocking half of the narrow dirt road. Our truck cannot back up to set because it is boxed in by all of this crap, so after fifteen minutes of trying to wait out the storm we cover our carts and equipment the best we can and shove through the muck, through the deluge and down the slippery hill, the whole hundred yards to the camera truck. An electrician is hiding under their makeshift staging area and I tell him that they really fucked us here. He shrugs, ambivalent, and says that he didn't make the decision to put the tent there. The best boy electric appears and he claims responsiblity so I repeat what I said, that the erection of this staging area across the road has really boned us in a big way and there better not be any water damage to any of the camera gear.
He's just standing there looking at me.
"Did you hear me?" I raise my voice. "You guys really screwed us here!"
"So?" he says, shrugging, and that is all that I need and I let him have all of my rage. I am ready to throw down on this guy. I don't care if he kicks my ass or I get fired or put in jail I am so ready to physically hurt him.
He sees this, though, sees me go into Manimal mode, and backs off a little. "What do you want me to do about it?" Then, a bit sarcastically: "Sorry!"
"I want you to move your shit off of the road where it should have been to begin with!!!!!"
I'm kind of up in his face and I'm way taller than he is and I'm waiting for him to shove me, to do anything that will license me to take him out. But the thing diffuses and I start to leave and he mumbles something and I spin around and yell "What? What was that? You got something to say?"
You got something to say.
I am in third grade all over again. This is the fighting language I learned back then and these are the words that spit out of my mouth right now.
You got something to say.
I am conscious of how ridiculous this all is, I'm in warrior mode but I'm also floating out and above myself, analyzing the mise-e-scene and the hackneyed dialogue and the environmental response to my rage. I turn back around and continue on to the truck and wipe the camera down and put it away and have a couple of beers in quick succession. And then it is over.
The next day is lovely and everything is lush and the rain never comes again like it's supposed to. The best boy electric works out of his truck all day so I don't see him until lunch. He looks different than the soaked, dirty man I confronted the night before. He looked larger somehow in all of his raingear. Today I see that he is older, in his forties, probably, and he's short and kind of dumpy and his non-designer jeans have a hole in the thigh. His posture is bad and he doesn't say much. He's probably single and he looks kind of sad.
And then I start to feel terrible.
2 comments:
The last time I was angry enough to throw down with someone was with, unfortunatley, my brother when my mom died. Man did I feel badly afterwards. I do know at the time, however, it seemed like the right thing to do.
Sounds like fun on the set for you for sure what with your bad employees, annoying co-workers, and the shitty weather.
Try an apology. Then you both will feel better.
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